Topics in Francophone Black Studies

Catalog description

This seminar engages a variety of topics in the lived experience of Black people in France, as well as other countries and spaces where it has exerted or continues to exert influence, often (but not always) through colonial and neocolonial practices (the Caribbean, Africa, America, etc.). Topics vary from year to year and might include questions of identity formation and Afropeanism; various and nuanced definitions of diaspora and belonging; explorations of how Blackness intersects with gender, sexuality, class, origin, ability and other identity markers; reflections on the complex relationship between colorblind French Republicanism and French Blackness; and/or study of transatlantic exchanges between Black French and African-Americans and the emergence of panafricanism. These lines of investigations will be followed via analyses of cultural products such as film, art, music, media, texts as physical objects, literature and theory. Taught in English.